Delivering better outcomes for more children with smarter fundraising, greater efficiency, and long-term donor relationships

Barnardo’s believes in children, and to transform the lives of the most vulnerable children and young people in the UK, it wants to tackle the challenges that families face before they disrupt lives. To have the greatest impact on a child’s future, Barnardo’s needs long-term strategies to stay connected with them as they grow into adulthood. But increasing demand for services coupled with limited resources means the nonprofit needed to think strategically about how to meet its goals.

“To meet our targets we need to double our income over the next ten years,” said Rohan Putter, Deputy Director of Fundraising, at Barnardo’s. “That means fundraising needs to play a more important role, and we really need to make our resources go as far as possible.”

Building blocks

Improving the lives of more children is Barnardo’s key objective, but all nonprofit organisations are facing strict new government regulations that require them to be more accountable for data security and donor privacy. “As well as complying with new security requirements, we need to meet the changing expectations of the public,” explained Putter. “People don’t want one-size-fits-all quarterly emails any more, we need to give donors the experience they want, and that means more personalisation, greater transparency, and better storytelling to show them where their money has been used.”

With limited development potential for its existing home-grown fundraising platform, Barnardo’s began to look for a solution that could support its ambitions. “We knew we could improve efficiency and save money by moving away from building our own systems,” said Richard Booth, Solutions Architect at Barnardo’s. “With Salesforce, we get a best-of-breed CRM, comprehensive integration capabilities, and a platform with the flexibility to support our future plans.”

Barnardo’s worked with Salesforce.org and an IT partner to implement an upgrade to Salesforce.org’s Nonprofit Success Pack during late 2016 and into early 2017. “There’s a whole community around Salesforce, and with their help, we were able to make the solution our own,” said Putter. “The fundraising model is different to traditional sales – there’s a huge amount of data that moves in bulk, we have massive campaigns going on all the time, and have to manage significant off-line activity including direct mail campaigns and face-to-face community fundraising. Salesforce.org really helped us overcome the challenge of reflecting this different world during implementation.”

Smarter fundraising

Today, every aspect of fundraising including campaign management, taking one-off donations, and recruiting long-term donors happens in Salesforce. “To get more funding we need to attract more supporters at scale,” explained Putter. “This year we’re aiming to bring another 25,000 regular donors on-board, and we need them to feel like part of the Barnardo’s family.”

As it on-boards these new donors, Salesforce will help the charity meet new legal requirements. “Supporter consent is a hot topic amongst UK charities,” explained Putter. “We must only engage with them about the things, and through the channels, they decide. With Salesforce, we can track every preference and every interaction to ensure we’re compliant.”

Salesforce is also helping Barnardo’s make these interactions more personal. “We can now have better conversations with supporters, as we can see at a glance who we’re talking to, how they’ve supported us in the past and which campaigns might be of interest to them,” explained Putter. “And with the Salesforce1 Mobile App, we can do it on the move, which is a huge advantage.”

By offering increasingly tailored communications, open rates, and donor engagement are on the up for Barnardo’s, as Putter explained, “SMS is becoming a big force in supporter engagement – people often don’t open an email, but they’ll always read a text. When they sign up, we send an SMS to prompt donors to tell us more about themselves, and we use that information to tailor how we interact with them.”

Barnardo’s is also starting to harness the power of Marketing Cloud to show donors exactly where their money has gone. “People want to know they’ve made a difference,” said Putter. “With Marketing Cloud, we’re exploring how we can send donors messages that are relevant to them in particular. For example, we could send an email thanking them for their support, triggered by their donation, while telling them about our work with children in their specific community.”

More for less

To free up resources for helping children, Barnardo’s needs to be as efficient as possible, and that means managing an increasing number of donors without adding to headcount. With Salesforce dashboards and reporting, the team can monitor every aspect of fundraising to make sure they’re doing just that. “Operational reporting across all areas of fundraising activity is managed within Salesforce” said Booth. “We’re looking into how we can use Wave Analytics to further enhance this capability.”

More satisfied users are also helping Barnardo’s become more efficient, as Booth explains: “Salesforce is a modern and engaging platform. People used to hate logging interactions, but now if you walk through the fundraising floor there’s a sea of Salesforce on people’s screens. I’m confident this will be made even better as we move to Salesforce Lightning wherever possible.”

Now that it’s mastered the basics, Barnardo’s is free to focus on innovation. “With Salesforce we can have a really collaborative approach between IT and fundraising, so we can create processes that work better for everyone. There’s a real sense of cohesion between teams as we work towards a common goal,” said Putter.

With Salesforce simplifying fundraising, Barnardo’s is securing more money to help children have a better future. And by nurturing relationships with its existing donors, the Barnardo’s family will continue to grow organically. “Being responsible with the funds we raise is at the core of our values, and with Salesforce helping us to become more efficient, we have more money to spend on the vulnerable children of the United Kingdom,” concludes Putter.